Here is where conspiracy theories come from:
The reason to distrust conspiracy theories, as mentioned in a previous post, is not because they are not "scientific", but because the ones that become popular are the ones that are good at grabbing attention, not the ones that are true. There is a bias towards capturing minds rather than attending to the truth, and the same can be said for much of the mainstream!
In the previous piece I mentioned the complex and opaque nature of our world, and in a sense this discussion here is a continuation of those ideas and how they relate to the lack of trust we see in our world, because conspiracy theories only exist in a low-trust society. In a tight-knit environment, people don't need to speculate on one another's intentions because they are, overall, on the same side, and because simpler environments are also more transparent. Hence we can conspiracy theories as one of the many symptoms that afflicts a population when the society they find themselves in is not trustworthy.
Let us now focus on point number 3) and 4): why do we formulate theories that we cannot test out, and what exactly are the ideas that are good at spreading, rather than being truthful?
The reality is quite simple for anyone who has had to step outside of the classrooms, which exclusively deal with toy examples: theories about anything important are by and large untestable. This is even more true in the case of society because there is an active incentive for concealment on the part of the most powerful people. Power nowadays maintains itself through opacity and misdirection, rather than brute force and overt subjugation.
Let's take a look at one of the central theories that is important for my worldview to illustrate this point. I believe in Peak Oil, the idea that our society is utterly dependent on fossil fuels to provide for its energy—in 2024 more than 80% of the global energy supply still comes from fossil fuels 1—and that all of the proposed alternatives, such as "renewables" and nuclear energy are only viable because of the underlying infrastructure, powered by fossil fuels once again, that those technologies rely on.
Can I prove that without any shadow of a doubt? No. I have to rely on external sources, my main one being the articles from The Honest Sorcerer, but how do I know that his data and analysis are correct? I have to trust him, as well as the fact that all of the alternative theories that I have seen with regards to energy only focus on economics and not the engineering aspect. It doesn't matter how much money you throw to renewables if they can't pay back for themselves in terms of energy. Right now, mining, transportation and the processing of ores are all done with fossil fuels, and I seriously doubt that our global supply chains would be viable if we transitioned to electricity, whether renewables or nuclear, because of all of the losses in energy that comes with it.
But how do I know that? I can't know directly and for sure, because making sense of the energy return on energy investment of nuclear and renewables is extremely difficult, as is anything of importance in the real world, and also because the companies and institutions that build those are not very keen on being transparent about those numbers. My conclusion is that they do not want us to know because then we would find out that the whole plan is flawed down to the foundations, but you can see how this sounds like a conspiracy theory already. 2
But the people who discredit peak oil are not very rigorous either. Many of them do not even tackle the question of energy, they simply talk about economics as I have mentioned, even though the latter is an abstraction that we build on top of the physical world which we cannot bypass. Energy and matter are fundamental in a way that money, interest rates, GDP and other metrics aren't.
In fact, the opponents to peak oil often resort to what is essentially a conspiracy theory, the idea that the only reason why renewables haven't taken the world over is because of the lobbying of fossil fuel industries. You heard that right! Even though nothing has been able to stop technological progress in all other domains—look at what happened with computers and LLMs for instance—we are supposed to believe that a technology which is supposedly better, able to meet the same demands in energy but in a more sustainable manner, hasn't taken over because of ... sheer lobbying, even though there is a massive incentive for companies and governments to switch to renewables if they were viable in any capacity, because of the boost in public opinion it would generate.
So my response to that conspiracy theory is that it is clearly false, if renewables were truly viable in terms of the energy they delivered relative to the cost of energy they required, they would have taken over without any issue, but since they haven't, it means that they are not viable. Again, can I prove it without a shadow of a doubt? No. Because making sense of the real world is incredibly difficult and we do not even have all of the information.
What about other domains of society then? Think of the explanations that people gave when Donald Trump was elected as president the first time. Many people gravitated towards the idea that Trump won because people didn't want a woman (Hillary Clinton) as president. Notice how once again this is a totally untestable claim, because it's not like we have a parallel reality where the runner-up was a man to test it out. 3
And this points to a simple but important aspect of economics and politics, which is that we only have our one society to "test" out our hypotheses upon. We can try to look at the past, but then again, the present shapes the way in which we view the distant past, through our narratives, biases, or the simple incompleteness of information. And the past is filled with so many events that we could basically back up any claim if we are selective enough about what we pick from it.
Societies are far too complex to recreate from first principles and then run simulations for them either. Even attempts at very narrow situations, such as trying to predict the result of a presidential election, catastrophically fail—again look at how confidently people predicted that Trump had no chance of winning. There are so many variables that you would have to take into account, biases in the dataset to correct, intangible aspects of human psychology that you would have to try to model, and the sheer explosion of interactions between all the variables considered would lead to models which are far too chaotic and computationally expensive to even be practical, let alone be accurate.
All of this is why in practice, theories about our society are not testable, because we only have access to the one society we live in, and even it is too complex to model accurately.
More often than not, people simply make claims that sound good enough and try to find others who will rally around those. Politics and Economics can never be as impartial as let's say Physics is because they are intrinsically linked with power in a way that the latter isn't. If you make a claim about the system and people agree with you, then it will lead to a movement from which you benefit. But the problem is that such benefits end up taking over as the main reason to run it, which is why as Eric Hoffer tells us:
Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.
Conspiracy theories exist because rackets do, and those exist because social rewards can be derived independently from your ability to be aligned with the truth. We all live in Plato's metaphorical cave, and it is often far more profitable to offer compelling ideas, even if they are only shadows, than to show the truth to most people, which is often so inconvenient and painful. This is the type of ideas that spread well, those that flatter the ego, as we will see in next part.
1 See Our world in data, the closest thing we can get to an official source on this.
2 There is also John Michael Greer's claim that nuclear companies require a lot of subsidies to get started, a claim backed up by the few searches on Google that I've made so I will tend to agree with that, but again making a definitive assessment on how much exactly they require, and whether a nuclear-only system could maintain itself (on the basis of energy, not just economics) is still basically impossible to conclude for sure.
3 And people will not blatantly say that they would hate the idea of a woman as a president if asked about it in public, because it isn't socially acceptable to say that. Also, just because it happened a second time with Kamala Harris in 2024 doesn't prove much because a sample size of two is hardly anything to go by if you want to be rigorous.
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Conspiracy Technosystem Atomization Trust Peakoil
2026-04-03